I recently went on a very interesting training day with the WFGA, it was a one-day course on winter pruning of apple trees: so I thought it would be timely to share some information with you, as this is very much a good time to do what I would call late winter pruning.
Which can help to avoid this sort of situation:
Oops. Yes, it blew over in a storm.... to be fair, it was a very old tree. But I digress. I just wanted to start off with a picture, and every other picture I have contains fruit, or masses of leaves, or both...
Now, you might be wondering why someone with my experience feels the need to go on courses, or training days, or skills workshops, whatever you care to call them: and the answer is that there is ALWAYS something to learn.
It is true that I felt a bit bad to be sitting there, happily listening to the tutor, Andrew, while all around me were diligently making notes: but I am sufficiently big and ugly that I no longer feel the need to pretend that I don't know something, when I do.
And there were indeed things to learn: one thing in particular was of great interest, because I had never heard of it before.
Oh, I'll just interrupt myself to remind everyone that, when “one” is self-employed, “one” should still undertake what is called Professional Development, which means going on courses, training days, workshops etc. Back when I worked in offices ( the”Dark Ages” as I call them), we were forever being sent on training courses, or those ghastly “team building” sessions, where the management would pretend to be on equal footing with the rest of us, but would still take the lead in every exercise because no-one had the nerve to tell them to stand aside and let someone else have a go.
(Except for one memorable session, when an otherwise very quiet and timid member of the firm suddenly told the Big Boss off, for automatically stepping forward to organise a project to drop eggs from the fire escape without breaking them, or something equally daft. We were all shocked speechless, as was he.)
Where was I? Oh yes, Professional Development is very important, when “one” is self-employed, in fact you could say that it's even more important for us, because we must continue to better ourselves, and without an HR department forcing us to do it, it's easy to let it slip. Not least because training usually costs us double.........
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